INFO-3401: Final Project Phase 2

Clark Mousaw

How is RTD bus line performance affected by inclimate weather in Boulder?

Data

I have 2 primary datasets, and 3 additional supporting datasets I will be using to invetigate this topic.

Primary:

1: "CORA RTD Data with Stops" Obtained via RTD after submitting a Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) request. This dataset has performace data for the buslines SKIP, DASH, FF1, 225, and 225D.

2: "NOAA Weather Data" Obtained via NOAA Climate Data Online request that contains weather data

Supporting:

3: "Stops" Info regarding the locations of specific bus stops. Contains lat/long. Taken from http://www.rtd-denver.com/GoogleFeeder/

4: "stoptimes" Gives more detailed info about a specific bus and its journey by using trip_IDs. Info Taken from http://www.rtd-denver.com/GoogleFeeder/

5: "trips" Connects trip_IDs to specific routes. Taken from http://www.rtd-denver.com/GoogleFeeder/

Note:

I will be conducting my analysis on bus performance from October 1st 2019 - November 9th, 2019. The data from the rtd google feeder link is refreshed each day, and lacks key historical performance information. The CORA RTD Data dataset contains performance information for bus lines, but lacks valuable contextual information.

Read in and Inspect Data

Prepare/Merge Data

Bus performance

First, I need to prepare my primary bus performance dataframe. To quantify bus performance, I am going to convert arrival and departure values to datetime values, and calculate the ifference beetween scheduled and actual departure times. This will leave me with a total amount of minutes the bus was early/late from the stop.

Inclimate weather

I also need to find the average amounts of inclimate weather that occurred over the time period. I am going to combine the precipitation and snow columns and create a new column with an average inclimate weather amount per day.

Analysis

In order to get a broad overview of how the individual bus lines performed over the time period, I am going to perform a groupby on "STOP_NAME" and "DATE" for each bus line.

Judging by the individual bus line performance plots, as well as the combined bus performance plot, it seems that there are specific days that bus performance was undoubtedly impacted. Also, keep in mind, the higher the spike, the more late the bus was when arriving at a specified stop. October 29th in particular saw severe delays across nearly all bus lines.

Let's get an idea of what the weather was like during the same time period.

The inclimate weather plot seems to have very similar spikes to the bus performance plots. Let's put the two on the same plot and do some further investigation

There looks to be some similar spikes between worse bus performance and inclimate weather, especially on the days of October 11th, and October 29th. Although to be fair, October 24th saw pretty bad weather, and it appears buses were not severely impacted.

However, showing that bus performance can be impacted by bad weather isn't a particularly revolutionary idea. I think it would be more interesting to highlight a specific day where bus performance and weather was bad, and look at which specific bus lines and bus stops had the best/worst performance.

Bus Line Performance

It appears from this bar plot that Skip and Dash were the worst performing bus lines on October 29th, while the 225 performed the best.

Individual Bus Stops

Finding the best and worst performing stops in each bus line

Best 3 Performing Bus Stops for each line

Line Bus Stops
FF1 Union Station Gate B17, Park Ave West & Wewatta St, Union Station Gate B6
Dash E Spaulding St & Dove Cove , E Spaulding St & S Public Rd , W Baseline Rd & N Cornelius St
Skip Downtown Boulder Station Gate H, Broadway & 20th St, Broadway & Hawthorne Ave
225D Diamond Cir & Black Diamond Dr, Aspen Ridge Dr & Diamond Cir, S Public Rd & Laser St
225T Broadway & 20th St, Broadway & College Ave, Tenino Ave & Oneida St

Worst 3 Performing Bus Stops for each line

Line Bus Stops
FF1 Broadway & Baseline Rd, S Broadway & Dartmouth Ave , Broadway & Euclid Ave
Dash Broadway & Canyon Blvd , Broadway & Euclid Ave ,Table Mesa Dr & Tantra Dr
Skip Broadway & Walnut St, Broadway & Alpine Ave, Broadway & Iris Ave
225D W Baseline Rd & N Cornelius St, Lafayette PnR Gate B, US 287 & Dillon Rd
225T Downtown Boulder Station Gate E, Broadway & Canyon Blvd , Broadway & Euclid Ave

Conclusions

How is RTD bus line performance affected by inclimate weather in Boulder?

Yes. If I were to take the data literally, DASH and SKIP perform the worst in inclimate weather. However, the analysis of individual bus stop performance for each bus line shows that the stops within the FF1 line had much worse performance on October 29th. DASH and SKIP seeming to perform worse could be because DASH and SKIP have more overall stops.

Somewhat. Two storms hit Colorado from October 1st to November 11th. During one of the storms which hit October 28th and 29th, overall bus performance was severely delayed. A similar, but not as dramatic performance hit was observed during another storm on October 11th. However, October 24th also saw inclimate weather, but the data shows a neglibible hit to bus performance.

Yes. The Broadway & Baseline Rd stop alone in the FF1 Bus line saw a total delay of 1674 minutes on October 29th. Interestingly enough, the least delayed FF1 stops on October 29th were all in / closer to downtown Denver, and the most delayed stops were all in Boulder, close to CU Boulder. The same bus stop mentioned above, Broadway & Baseline Rd, saw a 727 minute total delay on October 29th, but within the DASH bus line instead of FF1. Other bus lines saw drastically different variations across the bus line during October 29th, a period of bad inclimate weather.

Something that surprised me during the inspection of the data was the sheer amount of stops that just one bus line makes in a single day. For example, SKIP alone has over 105 northbound and 105 southbound trips per day, and there are 49 stops in that bus line. When I was calculating overall performance delays on days with inclimate weather, I was seeing what seemed like unfathomable delays (6000+ hours). But when divided over 10,000 stops just for one line, the delays seemed so much more minor.

Future Work

There were a few things I wish I could have accomplished during this project that I was unable to. If I were to continue working on this project I would do the following: